February 13, 2019 - Congressman Tom McClintock delivered the following remarks at an AIPAC Luncheon held in Sacramento on February 8, 2019:

AIPAC Luncheon
Sacramento, California
February 10, 2019

Thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen, for hosting these annual luncheons, which allow our entire community to come together to express our united support for the security of Israel.

In the 11 years you have been kind enough to invite me to speak, one threat to the survival of Israel and the peace of the entire world has loomed above all others, and that is the illegitimate terrorist regime in Tehran.  The mullahs have made crystal clear that they are determined to develop nuclear weapons and once obtained, to use them against Israel and against our own country.

I have long believed that the only way to stop them short of war is for that regime to collapse from within, and over these last 11 years, there have been moments when it looked like that would happen.  Sadly, American policy blunders at these critical moments have squandered these opportunities.

We have seen the United States provide cargo pallets of cash to the Mullahs.  We have seen American duplicity in the shameful resolutions that condemned the Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria.

But more recently, we have seen the strengthening of American resolve.  It was expressed last year by our nation recognizing Jerusalem as the rightful Capital of Israel and by President Trump’s decision last May to withdraw from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal.

At the time that deal was made, many of us warned that its provisions were unenforceable and that they gave wide latitude for the regime to continue its development of nuclear weapons.

No less than the head of Iran’s nuclear agency recently admitted as much – bragging that they broke their promises long ago by replacing critical components of their nuclear weapons production facilities that they were supposed to have destroyed.  

The re-imposition of sanctions against Tehran is again slowly increasing the political pressure for regime change within Iran.  Company after company is withdrawing from business in Iran and the impact on the economy is unmistakable.

Re-imposing sanctions is a start, but we owe the oppressed people of Iran and its growing resistance movement much more.  The Iranian expatriates in our communities tell me that within days of the Obama Administration releasing hundreds of millions of dollars to Tehran, that they saw that regime clamp down hard on the opposition that had manifest itself throughout the country.  

I believe that we now owe it to the Iranian opposition to provide them with at least the same financial and material support that we gave to the Mullahs four years ago.

I believe the tide is turning against Iran, and as Shakespeare reminds us, “There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune; omitted all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.  On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”

Israel faces many other threats: the BDS movement and the continued rise of anti-Semitic demagogues like Louis Farrakhan, and their acolytes at home and abroad, must continue to be opposed at every opportunity.  But the collapse of the Iranian regime under renewed international pressure led by the United States would be the single most important development in decades, and the greatest single step we could take for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East and indeed, throughout the world.

Let us strive to make that happen.
Source: Congressman Tom McClintock